by Michael Hiestand, USA TODAY Sports

by Michael Hiestand, USA TODAY Sports

Fox's Darrell Waltrip, in the Daytona 500 prerace show Sunday, predicted "more eyeballs will be watching this race than ever before."

Possibly. And if that proves out in the TV ratings, with Jimmie Johnson's late push to get the victory, it's partly because Fox got lucky well before the race even started. But give the network credit: It also didn't blow it on race coverage.

Fox had promised not to overdo coverage of Danica Patrick, who finished eighth after her historic pole-winning start. That storyline gave Fox a publicity bonanza last week.

The race announcers Sunday -- Waltrip, Mike Joy and Larry McReynolds -- rarely mentioned Patrick during the first 60 laps and never really went overboard.

But then, it wasn't necessarily motivated solely by a passion for balanced coverage: Fox also has to sell lots of ad time to sponsors of other drivers -- who might not be thrilled if the network had turned Sunday's race into the Danica 500 or Go Daddy 500.

When Waltrip mentioned that Patrick hadn't lost race positions during a green-flag pit stop -- when she actually had -- it seemed more like an honest slip-up rather than some sort of effort at cheerleading for the biggest celebrity in the sport.

The only real Fox glitch with Patrick came after the race, when she wasn't asked about something even casual fans might have wondered: After hanging onto third place for most of the last 10 laps, did she sort of pull up in the last lap because cars had crashed and she anticipated a caution flag?

ESPN, of course, got in on the act -- as it does at every event whether it happens to be airing the action or not. Only minutes after Fox went off the air, ESPN had Patrick live in its on-site NASCAR Now studio. There Rusty Wallace asked this probing question: "Do you have any idea how good you looked today?"

Otherwise, Fox scored on the new wrinkles that will re-appear in its NASCAR coverage this season. Its Gyro-Cam, a stabilized camera showing viewers the driver's view of banked turns, gave a much better perspective than standard in-car shots.

Fox Sports president Eric Shanks, after the race, told USA TODAY Sports that he liked the shot and "Gyro-Cam is going to get really dialed in" on future coverage. Shanks also liked Fox putting a ground-level camera in the middle of the track -- giving viewers the look under cars as they zoomed by. The network had previously put such cameras just around the edge of the track.

"Those shots made me take a huge deep breath," Shanks said.

He also "loved so much" an overhead camera that zipped along the backstretch at speeds up to 85 miles per hour. But given it adds to the cost of coverage, he says, Fox will only look to use it at select tracks.

On last year's Daytona 500 coverage, Fox had just one commercial break that included side-by-side live action. In a long-overdue expansion of an idea that been kicked around for more than a decade, Fox offered several side-by-side ad breaks Sunday -- including all over the last 30 laps.

Fox did have one sequence (albeit unintentionally) that produced the most funny moment in the coverage. In the prerace show, Fox assigned Erin Andrews, who the network tries to include in all kinds of coverage since she left ESPN last summer, to take a sort of unscripted stroll through the pits. Using that casual approach brings risks, compared to the usual practice of being alongside interview subjects before going on-air.

Andrews reported that "the one cool thing about the Daytona 500 as we've been hanging out here is there are so many celebrities." Such as rapper 50 Cent, who appeared on-air and kissed Andrews, despite her efforts to bob and weave (although she avoided a direct hit to the lips). Then the pair went hunting for Patrick -- unsuccessfully.

The unscripted moment was more entertaining than hearing the umpteenth sound bite from America's celebrity-of-the-week.

As to Waltrip's prediction that this will be the most-watched Daytona, Fox probably won't break the record -- which comes with a big asterisk. The current record -- 19.4 million viewers for the 2006 race on NBC -- came when the Daytona 500 got a big lead-in and plenty of hype from the 2006 Winter Olympics, which surrounded the race.

But Sunday's Daytona 500 might come close to that record -- at the least, viewership should be way up from the 13.7 million for last year's race. It helps Fox going forward that superstars Johnson and Dale Earnhardt Jr. finished first and second.

And Fox is on a roll. It is expected to announce, maybe as early as this week, that it has won TV basketball rights to the seven colleges that are leaving the Big East, including Georgetown and Marquette. That TV package will help provide on-air tonnage for the Fox Sports 1 general-interest cable sports channel that the network is expected to formally announce March 5.